"Anything can be a slaaaam poooeeeem if you say it like thiiis," says Amy Poehler's formidable character Leslie Knope in NBC's Parks and Recreation. Style can often trump substance in performance poetry, but Jess Green has managed to buck this trend with Dear Mr Gove.

It isn't just her punchy hand gestures which get her message across. Lines such as "I would like Hayley/ Whose dad incidentally walked out on her for the tenth time last week/ To get one ounce of credit for her speaking and listening" or, "It is not cheating Mr Gove, it is editing/ I'm sure War and Peace would have been a very different book without at least one glance over", have struck a chord with exhausted teachers and students up and down the country who agree with Green about the dangers of Gove's education reforms.

This piece of performance art has articulated the frustrations of many, and renewed a small, humble hope that maybe their struggles will be recognised by the man "with that chip on [his] shoulder because [he] never made it to Eton." Jess' finely balanced work isn't alone; in recent years the poetry slam has blossomed into a medium that fiercely challenges the political establishment. So which others pack a similar punch?

1. Terisa Siagatonu and Rudy Francisco: Sons

This piece, performed during the semi-finals of the 2013 National Poetry Slam in Los Angeles, explores the inadequate responses to rape culture in the US. Particularly heart-breaking are Siagatonu and Francisco's references to the 2012 Steubenville rape case.

Performed for the 2013 US National Poetry Slam in Portland, Dang highlights the covert racism of those who feign naivety and assume others' nationalities. He illustrates how racial antagonisms undermine potential. "Every time you lump an Asian person into one culture/ it's systematically making us assimilate into an America we thought was better than our war-torn home", highlighting how the "melting pot" is sometimes little more than a fantasy.

Koyczan performed this at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, both as a welcome to the international audience and as a rebuke to presuppositions made about America's northern neighbour. Standing in front of a lake he declaims, "We are more than genteel or civilized/ We are an idea in the process of being realised", highlighting, in a similar vein to Dang, the frustrations of cultural assumptions – even if they're well-meaning.

Though perhaps not as poetically strong as the others, Wellington's, "The national debt and the student loan crisis are bubbling/ Meanwhile we can't find common lines of agreement between Democrats and Republicans" chimes in with growing political discontent in the US.

This collaborative slam is a memorial to the killing of Sean Bell on his wedding day in New York in 2006, in what some have seen as a racially-motivated shooting by police. The piece is both powerful in its imagery – Bell's fiancee being without a groom the following day – and its wider comment on racial profiling in the US.